Jon Wiener

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“It Sounded Like It Was Going To Be Something Like Another War On Drugs, A Very Amorphous Thing”

September 22, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Videos | Permalink

From an interview posted at the Los Angeles Review of Books which Jon Wiener conducted with Joan Didion one week after September 11, 2001:

“Jon Wiener:

The news today is that President George W. Bush has just launched —

Joan Didion:

‘Operation Infinite Justice.’ Yes.

Jon Wiener:

You’ve always paid close attention to our political rhetoric. What do you make of ‘Operation Infinite Justice’?

Joan Didion:

At first it sounded like we were immediately going to be bombing someone. Then it sounded like it was going to be something like another war on drugs, a very amorphous thing with a heightened state of rhetoric and some threat to civil liberties.”•

For a real challenge, build King Kong on top of the Twin Towers”:

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“It Was Nothing Like What I Had Seen When Stoned”

December 26, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I’ve never used illegal drugs, but my experience with people who have is that, members of the Grateful Dead excepted, heavy LSD users are the biggest assholes, even worse than cokeheads. Maybe because they’ve briefly glimpsed the world through cleansed doors of perception and are disappointed by the reality they face when they come down? But most likely it’s just because they’re assholes. From Jon Wiener’s  Los Angeles Review of Books interview with neurologist Oliver Sacks, who’s neither an asshole nor a heavy user of drugs, a conversation about the doctor’s long-ago experimentation with acid:

“Jon Weiner:

When and how did you first come to take LSD?

Oliver Sacks:

I think it was a few months after I smoked that joint. There was a lot of LSD around. In one of the early experiences I had with LSD, recklessly, I had mixed it with some other drugs and topped it off with some cannabis. I’d been reading about the color indigo, and was puzzled by the fact that no two people seemed to agree on what indigo was. Newton added indigo to the spectrum because he thought the spectrum ought to have seven colors, as the musical scale has seven notes.

Anyhow I got stoned on acid. And when I was really high, I said, ‘I want to see indigo, now!’ And, as if thrown by a paintbrush, a huge, trembling, pear-shaped drop of purest indigo appeared on the wall in front of me. It seemed wonderfully luminous, and sort of numinous at the same time. So much so that I thought, ‘This is the color of heaven. This must be the color which Giotto tried to get into his paintings but could never get. And maybe he couldn’t get it because it doesn’t exist.’

I lent toward this in a sort of rapture, and it suddenly disappeared, leaving me with an immense sense of loss. I had had a sense of bliss or rapture, almost orgasm, seeing the indigo.

For months after, I kept looking for indigo. I went to a mineralogical museum and looked at azurite, which is often described as indigo. But it was nothing like what I had seen when stoned.

I did see indigo again, curiously. I was at a concert, listening to some Monteverdi. And I was enraptured by the music, thrown into a sort of ecstasy. The concert was in the Egyptology gallery of a museum in New York, and in the interval I went out and saw some of the lapis lazuli things. And they were indigo. And I thought, ‘It really exists.’ But then, after the concert, I went again, and it wasn’t indigo. I’ve never seen it since.'”

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“As Bad Writers Go, He Took The Cake”

November 13, 2012 in Books, Excerpts | Permalink

Gore Vidal regularly diminished other writers-often really talented ones–as a means of elevating himself. It’s an immature and cheap way of making yourself seem superior. (It’s the same thing that Chevy Chase, that miserable prick, does with fellow comedians). In a 2006 interview conducted by Jon Wiener that’s published at Los Angeles Review of Books, Vidal used this tactic on Truman Capote and Thomas Pynchon, two writers who were his betters and who turned out works that will outlast anything he did. Not even close. An excerpt:

“Jon Wiener: 

One of the things they do at community colleges is teach writing. I think there are programs everywhere now. At my school, U.C. Irvine, we have an undergraduate major called ‘Literary Journalism.’ It started only a couple of years ago, but it already has over 200 majors, and if there are 200 at Irvine, there is a similar number at a hundred other schools. This means hundreds of thousands of students are studying to be writers. What do you make of this?

Gore Vidal: 

We have Truman Capote to thank for that. As bad writers go, he took the cake. So bad was he, you know, he created a whole new art form: the nonfiction novel. He had never heard of a tautology, he had never heard of a contradiction. His social life was busy. To have classes in fiction — that really is hopeful, isn’t it. People can go to school and bring in physics. The genius of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow: he had to take all of his first year courses at, what was it, Cornell? One of his teachers was Nabokov. And everything he had in his first year’s physics went in to Gravity’s Rainbow. Whether it fit in or not, it just went in there. That’s one way of doing it.”

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